Thoughts from a marketing practitioner and demand generation expert.

August 2011

How to Not Get Fired as a Marketer

Consider this job description on LinkedIn:

Pre-IPO startup looking for a marketer with experience in advertising, trade shows, long-cycle product management, public and analyst relations and big-budget campaigns. Must be able to create 18-to-24-month marketing plans and adhere to them rigidly. Experience managing a creative team of marketers and Madison avenue agencies. Must be able to present in front of management team on metrics to include reach, brand value, amount of marketing activity and hits in conventional media.

What do you notice about this description?

Well, first of all, it doesn't exist. And it will never exist again. It's a relic, a souvenir of an era that is coughing and sputtering its final breaths. This job description embodies the closed, herarchical, company is in control of the buyer's process that was so prevalanet in industrial marketing during most of last century.

What else do you notice?

It's probably the job description of someone you know, someone who went to a top-tier school, got a great education, maybe lives in a great house with Italian marble entryways and sub zero refrigerator. Someone who is great at Scrabble and likes to golf. Someone whose educational background has left them as unprepared for the new world of marketing as a bicyclist at the Daytona 500. Someone who will soon be fired.

If you want to ensure a short-lived career at a company as a B2B marketer, limit yourself to only those skills you learned in business school years ago.

Today's marketing leaders must have a diverse set of skills, perhaps more diverse than anyone on the executive management team. The ideal CMO has the analytical mind of Galileo, the creativity of Picasso, the leadership skills of Ghandi, the foresight of Nostradamus, the design sense of Steve Jobs, the communication skills of Franklin Roosevelt and the patience of Mother Theresa.

Modern marketing automation solutions have democratized the availability of the tools necessary to tie the jumble and pace of marketing activities to real revenue results for business. The way to not get fired is not to buy a piece of marketing automation. It's to become a better marketer and contribute to real revenue growth.

Awesome piece Steve. I would only add a small historical footnote. Nostradamus' track record for foresight is a bit hard to measure, since most of his predictions were written in a fusion of 3-4 languages describing abstract visions of a future he couldn't understand. So Nostradamus (according to a documentary I saw once) used obfuscation to avoid persecution/death at the hands of religious zealots - a more literal version of "getting fired."

In many ways, modern marketers have to reverse-engineer the Nostradamus method. i.e., we have to explain complex data from the past in simple, digestible terms to drive future actions. I would be tempted to say that marketers have to have the foresight of Nouriel Roubini, except we're generally not allowed to forecast bad news without quickly adding a plan to make it better. Roubini gets to doom-and-gloom all day to a standing ovation.

About

Steve Gershik has been a VP of Marketing and demand generation leader for over 18 years. He frequently writes and speaks about marketing automation, brand management, demand generation and Internet marketing.